Books to Die For

Michael Louis Calvillo's BIRDBOX

It's hard to believe it's been over three years since Michael Louis Calvillo's death. Three years since a lengthy battle with cancer and its attendant complications robbed us of one of the most innovative and interesting voices in contemporary horror. Of course, Michael wasn't just a good author, he was also a genuinely good guy. I had the pleasure of interviewing him in January 2011 for RUE MORGUE, and later working with him on 7 BRAINS, his unconventional zombie novella that was released by my then-small press Burning Effigy. But that's not the book I want to talk about today. I want to talk about BIRDBOX, a novel that's central threat is both familiar yet wholly original. And a book that deserves to live on even if its creator cannot.

From the book feature on Michael Louis Calvillo in Rue Morgue #109 :
In BIRDBOX four siblings unwittingly unleash an ancient demonic force while exploring an abandoned house that was once the site of a gruesome murder. The kids are forced into a showdown with the thousands of birds the evil entity has possessed in its attempt to bring about the apocalypse.
"Birds are freaky when you think about it," says Calvillo. "Not only are they freaky, there are just so many of them! If you ever take the time to think about it, to just look around and consider - with their jittery little heads and spastic little beaks - we wouldn't even stand a chance. With their soulless eyes and indifferent natures, they wouldn't think twice about swallowing you down."

One of the things that makes BIRDBOX a Book To Die For, however, is that these are no ordinary possessed birds, they can merge and mesh with human flesh - a horrifying concept that's equally horrifying in execution, creating one of the book's most memorable elements and a truly unforgettable scene of avian-inspired terror.

"I'm a big fan of weird fiction," Michael told me, at the time of BIRDBOX's release. "The stranger the better. I like tapping into universal discomforts and tweaking them, kinking them, raising a lump in the back of your throat. I try to fuse those literary skills I learned in college with the typical genre stuff filling the horror racks. Horror for me is not so much about werewolves or vamps, it's about digging about until I happen upon the unsettling creepies that tickle the back of your brain."

If you feel this way about horror fiction too, do not let BIRDBOX fly past your grasp. The trade paperback edition is available directly from publisher Bad Moon Books , used copies sell on Amazon for slightly cheaper.